Paul Street, historian and political analyst, reflects on the all-too-rarely noted problem that the United States is authoritarian by constitutional design. The U.S. Constitution is held up as the sacred document protecting the "Peoples" Rights, yet invariably it is the right of property and those who have too much of it who are protected against calls for equity and justice.
U.S. politics and policy are poisoned beyond all democratic recognition, he says, by an explicitly anti-egalitarian charter drafted and passed by 18th Century slaveholders and merchant capitalists for whom popular sovereignty was the ultimate nightmare. Street details how U.S. politics and policy are badly distorted by the nation's exceptionally durable charter and how we might finally and productively stop playing "Simon Says" with militant anti-democrats like Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay.
His is a timely analysis to understand why both the Congress and the Supreme Court continue to side with the property rights of the corporations who poison our food, profit from our abuse at their hands, and push the Earth's climate to existential extremes with their aggressive efforts to continue exploitation of fossil carbon.
Open University of the Left
Paul Street is an independent radical-democratic policy researcher, teacher, journalist, historian, author and speaker based in Iowa City Iowa and Chicago, Illinois. He has authored seven books to date and essays and commentaries have appeared in a wide variety of media venues such as CounterPunch, Truthdig, Black Agenda Report, the Chicago Tribune, The New York Times, and CNN to name only a few.
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